A practical tracing journey with OpenTelemetry on Node.js

1

Zipkin

Let's talk about the exporter. Because OTel is an open standard, you can theoretically export to any tool that supports the OTel API. For example, there's a ConsoleExporter included that prints traces to the console, but that's not very useful. There's an exporter to Elasticsearch, and you can write your own library to export to a file or database or whatever. However, two of the most popular options are Jaeger and Zipkin, and you can easily run them locally with Docker.

#Monitoring Tools #Application Performance Monitoring #Log Management 27 social mentions

2

Open Telemetry

If you aren't familiar with tracing, think of it as being able to look inside your service to see what's going on. If I could instrument my app, I'd be able to view traces of my requests, which would show details about what my app did and how much time it spent. I've used Elastic APM and Sentry for tracing before, and there are other vendors as well, but I decided to try OpenTelemetry.

#Monitoring Tools #Performance Monitoring #Log Management 156 social mentions